Me

 

"The fragment of the earth 

That is now me, is only on its way

through me. It is on its way

from having been a tree, 

a school of fish, a terrapin, 

a flock of birds. It will

pass through all those forms again."

Wendell Berry

Duty

 

Duty

The maple leaves that turned into flame
are burning down to embers.
Time to bank the fires of the year.

I know you feel the darkness closing in,
but what makes you think that's
your problem to solve? Stop trying
to tie leaves back into branches.

Answer the questions that are yours to ask.
(Who is my neighbor?)
Make the things that are yours to make.
(Split peas or lentils in the soup?)

When the old rabbi talked about
tikkun olam - your duty
to repair the world - he made it clear.

The only way creation is restored
is through inviting the tiniest shards
to find their way back home
to a wholeness we keep trying to imagine.

Lynn Ungar, 11 Dec 23

Surrender

 

Be Ground.

Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. 

You have been stony for too many years

Try something different. 

Surrender. 

Jalaluddin Rumi

You will miss the mundane

 

I can so relate to this excerpt. I am an ardent lover of the mundane, it defines me like nothing else does. 😊 Maybe because I take nothing for granted. Every change of the light is a gift.

Jack Gilbert also expressed it so beautifully, in this poem:

"I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember."

"You'll miss the mundane walk from the post office to the store to the house--the dog greeting you; the neighbors waving; the breeze on your face. You'll miss the slow woman who disrupted your pace.

You won't know this until the walk is difficult or impossible.

There is something to loving the mundane--Thornton Wilder, I believe, dealt with this, to great and roaring cynicism. Be awake and alive and present, because this is your own great and gilded age, and it's going to slip away with brutal swiftness.

People pay small fortunes to see a whale for three seconds or an eagle fly ahead, but they race through their one and only life. I'm fairly positive that I'll regret my stupidity the most in my final moment of awareness."

Alec Guinness, Interview with James Grissom

You have more than enough. Always have.

 

Abundance

By Amy Schmidt
in memory of Mary Oliver

It's impossible to be lonely
when you're zesting an orange.

Scrape the soft rind once
and the whole room 
fills with fruit.

Look around: you have
more than enough. 
Always have.

You just didn't notice
until now.

Gardening

 

For my dear friend Reena, gardener, lover of gardens, creator of beauty

"Indeed, to garden — even merely to be in a garden — is nothing less than a triumph of resistance against the merciless race of modern life, so compulsively focused on productivity at the cost of creativity, of lucidity, of sanity; a reminder that we are creatures enmeshed with the great web of being, in which, as the great naturalist John Muir observed long ago, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe”; a return to what is noblest, which means most natural, in us. 

There is something deeply humanizing in listening to the rustle of a newly leaved tree, in watching a bumblebee romance a blossom, in kneeling onto the carpet of soil to make a hole for a sapling, gently moving a startled earthworm or two out of the way.

Walt Whitman knew this when he weighed what makes life worth living as he convalesced from a paralytic stroke: “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”

Maria Popova

The Healing Power of Gardens: Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature

Photo: Flower of the Cannon Ball Tree, Nagalinga Pushpa. The flowers grow out of the trunk of the tree.

The Love of your Fate

 

Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. 

If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. 

Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes. 

Joseph Campbell, Book: Reflections on the Art of Living (I have yet to read this book)

A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Audible Audiobook

It’s giving, until the giving feels like receiving

 

From 'To Begin With, The Sweetgrass'

Mary Oliver

II

Eat bread and understand comfort.

Drink water, and understand delight.

Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets

are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds

who are drinking the sweetness, who are

thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.

Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.

Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star

both intimate and ultimate,

and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:

oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two

beautiful bodies of your lungs.

III.

The witchery of living

is my whole conversation

with you, my darlings.

All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.

This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.

It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.

It’s more than the beating of the single heart.

It’s praising.

It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.

You have a life—just imagine that!

You have this day, and maybe another, and another.

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage

 

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage.

So I sat still for three days
and God came to me.

Kabir, in 'Love Poems from God, Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West'

Belonging

 

The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac (Part 3)

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you're in it all the same.
So why not get started immediately.
I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.
And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened.
Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses

Love

 

I want so badly some days
to be the kind of person who keeps a gratitude journal

and believes in manifestations, who believes
that if I throw myself on the mercy of the universe

the universe will be merciful, that happiness is as simple
as mirror work, which people tell me is not easy,

because who can look in the mirror for three minutes
and say I love you, I love you, I love you

without bursting into tears over all the ways
we have not loved ourselves.

Jennifer Saunders, from When the Guest Speaker Told Us

The Cat's Song

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

Marge Piercy

A Gift

 

The middle of June, and I awake
to rain - gentle, persistent, enough
to soak the  ground and clear  the air.
 
Isn't this the best kind of surprise-
the thing you wanted but couldn't get
for yourself and didn't know
that you could have? Already
the frogs are singing and the grass
stretches its roots in rejoicing.
 
And here am I, with my damp hair
and empty hands, and nothing to say
but "Oh!" and "Thank you!"
 
Once again the world - my one
true love - has brought me flowers.
 
Lynn Ungar, 9 Jun 2023

Joy is not made to be a crumb

 

Don’t Hesitate

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.

Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Mary Oliver

The Mahabharata

"The Mahabharata is not a work of religious instruction.

It is much greater. It is a work of art.

It understands men will always fall in the shifting chasm between the tug of the moral and the lure of the immoral. 

It is in this shifting space of uncertitude that men become men. 

Not animals, not gods.  

It understands truth is relative. That it is defined by context and motive. It encourages the noblest of men - Yudhishtra, Arjuna, Lord Krishna himself - to lie, so that a greater truth may be served.

It understands the world is powered by desire. And that desire is an unknowable thing. Desire conjures death, destruction, distress.

But also creates love, beauty, art. It is our greatest undoing. And the only reason for all doing.

And doing is life. Doing is karma.

Thus it forgives even those who desire intemperately. It forgives Duryodhana. The man who desires without pause. The man who precipitates the war to end all wars. It grants him paradise and the admiration of the gods. In the desiring and the doing this most reviled of men fulfils the mandate of man.  

You must know the world before you are done with it. You must act on desire before you renounce it. There can be no merit in forgoing the not known.

The greatest book in the world rescues volition from religion and gives it back to man.

Religion is the disciplinarian fantasy of a schoolmaster.

The Mahabharata is the joyous song of life of a maestro.

In its tales within tales it takes religion for a spin and skins it inside out. Leaves it puzzling over its own poisoned follicles.

It gives men the chance to be splendid. Doubt-ridden architects of some small part of their lives.

Duryodhanas who can win even as they lose.” 

Tarun J. Tejpal, "The Alchemy of Desire"